Technoromanticism

[Dave Monroe]

>From Richard Coyne, Technoromanticism: Digital
Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), "Introduction," pp.
2-15 ...

"McLuhan indentified the era of preliterate culture as
a golden age in which humankind was at one with itself
and with nature.  Speaking and listening in the
absence of writing involved highly intractive
exchanges that come close to directly sharing
thoughts.  Aural culture was tribal, engaged,
practical, and unitary.  Then followed th age of
litracy.  When we write, we lay things out in order
and divide the world.  Society under literacy is
urban, global, and fragmented, rather than local,
inetgrated, and whole.  For McLuhan, information
technologies are implicated in this shift between the
whole and its individuation, or more generally,
between unity and multiplicity.  Intitially teh
introduction of writing brought about the
proliferation of individuation.  now we are enetering
athird age in which the incessant buzz of electronic
communications returns us to a tribal state, but now
the whole world is a tribe.
   "McLuhan presents one of the many variants of the
narrative of unity and multiplicity that pervade IT
(information technology) discourse.  Similar
narratives cluster around teh four great artifices of
the digital age: virtual communities, virtual reality,
artificial intelligence, and artificial life.  In
narratives of virtual communities, people who have
never met face-to-face are drawn together to
participate in the global tribe through the media of
electronic mail, on-line chat, computer role games,
and video conferencing in ways similar to how
conventional communities form, but without depending
on spatial proximity, and in ways that obscure the
divisiveness of issues of appearance and status...."
(p. 2)

"Virtual communities are poited against the
fragmentation of current social forms, or the failure
of conventional mass media to realize the goals of
producing an informed and active citizenry, a truly
civil society.  Virtual reality presents a world where
you can be yourself, against a duplicitous world in
which you have to conform to the expectations of
others: a fake and fragmented world of similarly
disconnected individuals." (p. 4)

By the way, saw The Matrix Reloaded last night.  The
loudest, fastest, flashiest movie I've ever fallen
asleep during.  And Laurence Fishburne, otherwise a
favorite, really got on my nerves with the incessant
portentiousness (that a word? is now ...).  Did enjoy
however the deployment of footage from The Brides of
Dracula, note the character called The Merovingian,
and watch for the Cornel West cameo ...


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